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We understand the administration's sense of urgency on health-care reform. But what is intended as a final sprint threatens to turn into something unseemly and, more important, contrary to Democrats' promises of transparency and time for deliberation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday that she is leaning toward a parliamentary maneuver under which the House would vote on a package of changes to the Senate-approved reform bill, and the underlying Senate bill would then be "deemed" to have passed, even though the House had never voted on it. That may help some House members dodge a politically difficult decision, but it strikes us as a dodgy way to reform the health-care system. Democrats who vote for the package will be tagged with supporting the Senate bill in any event. Why not be straightforward about it? -
As more handsets have been rolled out running Google’s Android operation system, mobile users have become more familiar with the platform and more likely to consider purchasing an Android-based smartphone.
Further data from Crowd Science confirms the trend: 66% of smartphone users are aware of Android, up 6 points since the introduction of the Nexus One handset in January.
What’s more, current Android users are nearly as loyal to the operating system as iPhone owners are to theirs. iPhone owners were more likely to say their next purchase would be an Android phone than vice versa.
Category: Uncategorized Page 8 of 16
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One clue to why Don Rainey is a friend to entrepreneurs comes from the way he talks about the executives running the companies in which he invests.
There is pride in his words, a paternalism that reveals the Grotech Ventures general partner has more than just money in the game.
“LivingSocial is a deal we added to in 2009. It is a company full of young energetic entrepreneurs,” he says. “It is really and exciting time for that company and I am certainly very proud of them.”
It sounds like he is talking about one of his children, or one of his students.
LivingSocial, which runs social networking Web sites, raised $5 million in venture capital from Vienna-based Grotech and from Steve and Jean Case.
Rainey says the co-founders of LivingSocial — Tim O’Shaughnessy, Eddie Frederick, Aaron Batalion and Val Aleksenko — “are going from being an early success to being one of the leaders in social networking. They are helping define social commerce.” -
One job of presidents is to educate Americans about crucial national problems. On health care, Barack Obama has failed. Almost everything you think you know about health care is probably wrong or, at least, half wrong. Great simplicities and distortions have been peddled in the name of achieving “universal health coverage.” The miseducation has worsened as the debate approaches its climax.
There’s a parallel here: housing. Most Americans favor homeownership, but uncritical pro-homeownership policies (lax lending standards, puny down payments, hefty housing subsidies) helped cause the financial crisis. The same thing is happening with health care. The appeal of universal insurance — who, by the way, wants to be uninsured? — justifies half-truths and dubious policies. That the process is repeating itself suggests that our political leaders don’t learn even from proximate calamities.
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Neither recession nor gadget overload shall slow the mania surrounding the introduction of Apple's iPad mobile computer.
On Friday, the first day that buyers could pre-order the device (it arrives in stores next month), Apple racked up an estimated 91,000 sales in just the first six hours of availability, putting temporarily to rest the Internet's persistent "iPad fail" meme. Analysts predict the first-year sales could reach 5 million. -
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday launched a broadband test service to help consumers clock the speed of their Internet.
Located at the site www.broadband.gov, the test is aimed at allowing consumers to compare their actual speeds with the speeds advertised by their providers.
The FCC release follows an FCC meeting in September where officials said that actual speeds were estimated to lag by as much as 50 percent during busy hours.
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The Apple iPad will be available to pre-order starting Friday, March 12. If you’re in the market for Apple’s “magical” device, here are five reasons why you should sign up early and buy on the very first day.
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One of the chief complaints of iPhone users since the debut of iPhone OS 2.0 and the apps store is the iPhone’s inability to multitask (run two or more programs simultaneously). New information suggests that iPhone OS 4.0’s biggest upgrade will be multitasking. Also, purported images of iPhone 4G have been spotted.
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Whatever the legislative fate of health reform — now in the hands of a few besieged House Democrats — the reformers have failed in their argument. Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president's public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, reengaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president's ambitions.
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It’s one thing to design and build software to live in the cloud from scratch. It’s something else to move existing applications over to cloud-computing platforms, which many companies need to do. This often means completely rewriting parts of the code to make it compatible with a particular provider’s infrastructure. CloudSwitch, a startup based in Burlington, MA, has designed software that could make the transition almost as simple as dragging and dropping a file from one folder to another.
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RightSide Capital Management is about to shatter the funding landscape. Led by David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee, RightSide Capital believes that seed-stage capital needs a complete overhaul. RightSide will make 100-200 investments per year, and literally manufacture companies in a way that no firm has ever done. The fund, announced at TheFunded.com’s Future of Funding event last Thursday, will debut in the second half of 2010 and may give the angel funding market a much-deserved shakeup.
Partner Kevin Dick went on stage during a panel on alternative funding methods and laid out what he believes to be the future of funding. Quantity, not quality, is king in the seed stage. Entrepreneurs looking for funding won’t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application – similar to applying to College – and receive a response in 2 weeks.
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A high school teacher in New Hampshire is free on $10,000 bail, accused of emailing naked photos of herself to a student.
41-year-old Melinda Dennehy of Hampstead is charged with one felony count of indecent exposure.
Police say she sent four nude pictures of herself to one of her 15-year-old students at Londonderry High School, where she teaches English. -
Recently Google announced that it will upgrade all US users to Android 2.1. Devices are currently shipping with four versions, so moving to one will help, but that may not be enough to save the platform from fragmentation.
The other problem is that there are too many different devices. InfoWorld points out that the Motorola Droid ships with 2.0, but doesn’t support multitouch at the OS level while the HTC Droid Eris does through HTC’s proprietary Sense UI. However, the Eris ships with Android version 1.5. Even if both get upgraded to 2.1, you’ll still have quite a disparity between these two devices. There are dozens of other devices and manufacturers that compound this issue even further.
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You probably can’t watch your kids 24 hours per day. Just because they have free time doesn’t mean you do. Luckily, your computer can help out.
Windows Vista has robust parental controls. They’ll help you monitor and limit your children’s computer usage.
Now, nothing can substitute for parental vigilance. So, talk to your kids about computer safety. And have them read and sign my 10 Commandments for Kids Online. -
There was a time, as 1999 rolled into 2000, when it seemed as if everyone was rich. Or, at least, as if they could be rich. They had equity. Or a big idea. Or a lock on friends-and-family shares in an IPO. With tech stocks soaring and venture capital money flowing, cashing in on the cyber revolution seemed a worthy bet.
That was then, of course. It’s been a decade since the tech-fueled NASDAQ reached its all-time high, on March 10, 2000, having nearly doubled itself in just a year. It was a dizzying peak reached thanks in part to a spectacular rise in the valuations of companies that had hitched their wagons to the Internet.
Later, it would be called a bubble, and much of the paper wealth it had created would evaporate. But in the spring of 2000, anything seemed possible. And the Washington area, with Northern Virginia’s tech corridor leading the way, had established itself as one of a handful of national tech hubs.
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TiVo on Wednesday introduced a set-top box that the company says makes it easier to access cable, movies, online video, and music through one remote control.
While an Internet-enabled digital video recorder is not new, TiVo Premiere is an advancement over other set-top boxes in the way it organizes content, according to the company. The product’s search tool, for example, can find programming and movies on cable TV, as well as video for rent or buy on Netflix, Amazon, or Blockbuster. -
Google, PayPal, Equifax, VeriSign, Verizon, CA, and Booz Allen Hamilton on Wednesday at the RSA Conference announced that they have formed a non-profit organization to oversee the exchange of online identity credentials on public and private sector Web sites.
The organization, The Open Identity Exchange (OIX), will serve as a trust framework provider. A trust framework is a certification program that allows organizations and individuals to exchange digital credentials and to trust the identity, security, and privacy assertions associated with those credentials.
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Apple's iPad is certain to grab headlines when it hits stores next month. But a number of touch-screen tablets powered by Google's Android operating system will also debut this year. Competing with Apple's latest consumer gadget won't be easy, but analysts say the software behind these devices could give them a few key advantages.
Like the iPhone OS, which will power the iPad, Android was originally developed for cell phones. This means it will be fast and low-power. "Android is very responsive; it's instantly available," says Jeff Orr, a senior analyst for mobile devices at ABI Research.